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Tom Johnson was one of those extraordinary characters that history throws up in times of crisis. Born in 1772 to Irish parents, he made the most of the opportunities that presented themselves and was earning his own living as a smuggler by the age of 12. At least twice, he made incredible escapes from prison. When the Napoleonic Wars broke out, his well-deserved reputation for extreme daring saw him hired to pilot a pair of covert British naval expeditions. But Johnson also has a stranger claim to fame, one that has gone unmentioned in all but the most obscure of histories. In 1820–or so he claimed–he was offered the sum of £40,000 [equivalent to $3 million now] to rescue the emperor Napoleon from bleak exile on the island of St. Helena.
Decades after a risky Cold War experiment, a scientist lives with secrets.
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Cosmo is huge — 6 foot 7 and 220 pounds the last time he was weighed, at a detention facility in Long Beach, California on June 26. And yet he’s getting bigger, because Cosmo — also known as Cosmo the God, the social-engineering mastermind who weaseled his way past security systems at Amazon, Apple, AT&T, PayPal, AOL, Netflix, Network Solutions, and Microsoft — is just 15 years old.
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The creator of The Thick of It spoke in central London on Monday night, with the talk titled ‘Fight, Fight, Fight’ - Armando Iannucci spoke at the annual Bafta television lecture about the need for British creative talent to be more forceful.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Total Recall made a huge impression by combining action movies with insane mind games. Based on a Philip K. Dick short story, it kept audiences guessing until the very end. And it was one of the most successful movies of the early 1990s. So why didn’t we ever get a sequel?
Turns out, we came really close, several times. Tons of scripts were written, all of which tried to preserve the ambiguity and craziness of the original film in different ways — and some of them sound like they were downright bizarre. Discover the long, weird saga of Total Recall 2, in this excerpt from the book Tales from Development Hell by David Hughes.
(Source: io9.com)
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Once upon a time, Microsoft dominated the tech industry; indeed, it was the wealthiest corporation in the world. But since 2000, as Apple, Google, and Facebook whizzed by, it has fallen flat in every arena it entered: e-books, music, search, social networking, etc., etc. Talking to former and current Microsoft executives, Kurt Eichenwald finds the fingers pointing at C.E.O. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates’s successor, as the man who led them astray. By Kurt Eichenwald
(Source: vanityfair.com)
Elizabeth Bennet James Bond and Sherlock Holmes have had countless reincarnations. Now, Long John Silver is the latest in a long line of old favourites to make a comeback
In the autumn of 1966, NASA asked President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Bureau of the Budget (BOB) for $100 million in Fiscal Year (FY) 1968 to begin Phase B contractor studies of Earth-orbital space stations. With the Apollo Program’s culmination drawing near, the U.S. civilian space agency was eager to establish post-Apollo goals, and topping its wish-list was a space station – an Earth-orbiting laboratory for testing the effects on men and machines of long-term exposure to space conditions and for performing scientific and technological experiments and Earth and space observations. By David S F Portree. @dsfportree
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